Chiral phosphorus compounds are of great interest as catalysts or catalyst components (“ligands”) for the enantioselective chemical synthesis of optically active products (Handbook of Enantioselective Catalysis with Transition Metal Compounds, Vol. II, VCH, Weinheim, 1993). Optically active products are of great economic importance as flavouring agents, cosmetics, plant protectants, food additives, pharmaceuticals, or in the preparation of high-tech materials, such as special plastics (Comprehensive Asymmetric Catalysis, Springer, Berlin, 1999). To date, despite of the wide variety of known chiral phosphorus compounds, only a few members have been put to use in industrial processes for the preparation of optically active products, because many ligands have serious disadvantages for technical applications. Many ligands, although exhibiting high enantioselectivities, form the desired chiral products with too low activities or insufficient chemo- or regioselectivities. Further, chiral phosphorus compounds which act as efficient ligands are often available only by tedious syntheses using expensive starting materials. In most efficient ligands, the chiral information which results in the selective formation of the optically active products is based on the use of chiral building blocks which are either derived from naturally occurring compounds or otherwise commercially available in an optically pure form. A structural variation in the chiral centre for optimising the phosphorus compound cannot be realized in a simple way in this case, and often only one of the two possible configurations is available. Therefore, there is a great need for novel chiral phosphorus compounds which can be synthesized in a simple and flexible way from readily available and inexpensive starting compounds and can be effectively employed as catalysts or catalyst components for the preparation of chiral products in various types of reaction.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,720,281 describes novel phosphorus compounds derived from quinoline derivatives. These ligands are effective in many circumstances, however the remains a need to provide alternative quinoline-based compounds that may be used in asymmetric catalysts.